Saturday, July 4, 2009

Things

It's the fourth of July as I write this. The other day I posted a status update on Facebook about Canada Day, except I posted it on the 2nd. Thinking the lateness comments on my status update were jabs at my timezone, I reiterated that point in a comment of my own. To which I was informed that Canada Day is on the 1st, not the 2nd. So where did I get my information? From the calendar(1) command I added to Fedora. I pulled it from OpenBSD (made in Canada!) and got it packaged up for Fedora. However, it has an off-by-one bug that I apparently discovered when it informed me that Canada Day was on the 2nd. I find it ironic that I saw the off by one bug while asking a program pulled from a Canada-based source tree about when Canada Day was. Now to patch.

Karen and I have been cleaning the condo in preparation for my family visiting. They arrive next week.

Karen's laptop stopped working the other day. Appears to be the AC circuitry, which is somewhat important to the laptop working. She's thinking about ordering a Dell Mini 10, so she's using my Mini 9 to see if she likes the small form factor. Unlike the 9, the 10 comes with either a real hard disk or an SSD. We will probably get her the real hard disk option so it's large enough for all of her data. And she will also be moving to Fedora with this new system.

Speaking of Fedora, the rawhide tree is quite raw at the moment. I expect this, but while upgrading my development systems, all sorts of things stopped working. SELinux started denying many things from working, Firefox never worked until it was updated to version 3.5. Sound completely stopped working giving me libao errors or other cryptic audio stack errors that I've never seen before. One of the 2.6.31 kernels crashed on boot, but I was able to boot the previous one just fine. Sound is back to working now, but as I skip through songs in Rhythmbox, the audio level decreases one level with each skip until it mutes entirely. Annoying. The strangest problem happened to me yesterday. Programs started crashing left and right and the system failed to reboot using any of the kernels I had. I booted up the Fedora 11 installer in rescue mode and when I tried to chroot in to /mnt/sysimage, nothing worked. Reverting /lib64/ld-2.10.90.so to /lib64/ld-2.10.1.so from Fedora 11 fixed things. Word of caution: watch out for the latest glibc in rawhide. Hope it gets fixed soon.